Provocation # 127 The good economics we need

Economics, if it were empirical, would be interested in the major economic phenomena some of which are:

Class (fruits of talent in one generation passed to the next in a frozen system)
Money (psychology of abstraction and desires)
Interest (as in shifting value of assets over time. The father has an interest in the pregnant wife)
Ownership (who does, who doesn’t, its basis)
Capital (surplus of production over cost)
Property (from what is proper to show rank in society)
Corporations (what is a body? A person?)
Individual (a social construct?)
Trade (CMC shifts to MCM across space and time)
Markets (where all that is made under many conditions is sold to many with a variety of motives, obscured by supply- demand without curiosity about where those come from)
Stock market (ownership problem)
Makers (workers)
Takers (capital owning rent extractors)
Quality of life (the output of the system)
Political regime (who decides?)

The problem is that the system, which ought to be feedback loops among all the terms aborts to ownership and wealth as outcome targets and leaves out quality of life and instead shifts to the feedback loops that maintain power and wealth in the hands of a small elite. Education, location of home, job entry, marriage, are all part of the narrow system we have, not the broad system we should have.

This would be ok if it didn’t lead to wars and environmental damage and broken hearts. But the current economy does. The economics that would help us get out of this mess does not yet exist. It would have to take seriously capital, ownership and politics and analyze all the feedback loops.

Most economic research seems to circle around the temple but not enter.

Your thoughts?